Wednesday, March 19, 2014

New Music Edmonton: Now Hear This Festival

The Quatuor Molinari, Pro Coro Canada, Strathcona String Quartet, WindRose Trio,
and the Violet Collective are some of the headlining Artists performing
at the third annual festival of New Music Edmonton, Now Hear This. The
prospect of New Music may be daunting for unfamiliar audience members;
however, NME resolves to reverse such perceptions by programming a diverse
array of New Music offerings that allows audience members to sample a
full spectrum. The festival focuses on the works of R. Murray Schafer, a
Canadian composer considered to have coined the term “soundscape.”

Juno award-winning, Quatuor Molinari, travels to Edmonton to perform Schafer’s quartets, which won them the 2014 Opus Prize for Concert of the Year.

Many professional Edmonton musicians are on the festival roster, such as the Strathcona String Quartet and Windrose Trio. This NME festival will also be the debut of the Violet Collective, named after the founder of NME, Violet Archer.
Archer was a formative figure in Canadian music history as a composer,
pedagogue, organist and pianist which led her receiving the Order of
Canada in 1984. She had strong ties to our Edmonton music community
since she held a Faculty position at the University of Alberta in the
Department of Theory and Composition until her retirement.

In addition, Pro Coro Canada,
performs the works of R. Murray Schafer. Schafer's Hear the Sounds
Go Round had its Canadian premiere at the Soundstreams Choral
Celebration concert back in February 2, 2014. Pro Coro Canada joined the
Vancouver Chamber Choir and Elmer Iseler Singers in Toronto to
celebrate over 60 years of professional choral singing in Canada. Pro
Coro Canada brings Schafer's newest piece to NME to share the whimsical
text and twisting melodies of Schafer. Pro Coro will also sing Missa
Brevis selections by Mathew Emery, an undergraduate composition student at the University of British Columbia. Emery already has numerous compositional accolades and is a name that has the world of Canadian choral music buzzing.

The
New Music Festival is now celebrating it's third anniversary, what do
you feel is the current state of new music in Edmonton and what hopes do
you have for the festival to increase new music awareness in our
community?

There has been some level of new music activity in
Edmonton since the 1970s, mostly organized by composers. Only in the
last 10 years or so has it been consistently performer-driven. A
festival allows one to be immersed for a prolonged period.

Audiences
often are looking for musical accessibility and new music may have the
reputation to be more abstract for mainstream audiences, what thoughts
could you provide in order to encourage unfamiliar new music audience
members?

New music has a different approach to familiar
concepts of melody, harmony and rhythm. Even though many new pieces do
not follow a narrative kind of structure, one can still have a sense of
drama (you never know what will happen next and you must give yourself
entirely to being in the moment.) In addition to those underlying
features there are surface attractions of new sounds and textural
combinations of different instruments.

New music artists and
composers all fall within a diverse range of styles and works. What does
NME look for when they are designing and programming the festival?

We
have a jury made up of diverse personalities, but all are looking for
quality. Having some theme (i.e. Murray Schafer ) is also good for
focus.

What inspired the festival to focus on works by R. Murray Schafer?

A concert proposal for Molinari Quartet to play four recent quartets by him.

New
Music Edmonton invites professional level musicians to perform new
music works, what motivated the NME to invite Pro Coro Canada, The
Strathcona String Quartet and WindRose Trio this time for the festival?

We want New Music Edmonton to be a hub and a community member.

What performances are you personally looking forward to and why?

I am looking forward to the Violet Collective, because this will be their first performance, and I have good feeling about it.

What would be some of your future hopes for the Society of New Music or the New Music Festival in general?

About Me

I'm a choir girl who is passionate about all things choir, music, and performance-related. I detail my musical musings and experiences here on this blog. In addition to being a Speech-Language Pathologist interested in the area of Voice Therapy, I'm an avid chorister in Edmonton singing with Pro Coro Canada and the Edmonton Opera Chorus.